Greatness of a Hero Review

Spoilers! Please do not continue since the ending is slightly given away!

I had so much hope for this series since it had a pretty big cast with a grand theme. I was also questioning why they would warehouse this series and show The Winter Melon Tale since that looks less interesting. Well, after completing the series, I now know why. This series had such great promise in the beginning! Some people like non-typical endings, but I like happy endings. I like my series complete and for series to give me a sense of satisfaction when I'm done, but this made me feel sad (and not in a good way!) since more than half the people in the above opening picture dies! I don't mind when they kill a character if it makes it a good part of the story and it makes sense, but the deaths that happened just made everything really tragic with no happy ending for any of the couples. They tried to make the ending seem happy by having the empress finally choose the heir to the throne and say that the sacrifices were worth it, but I didn't care! It just made me feel bitter and cold.

• Why why why?!? did they have to kill Sunny? He dies because he sees someone disguised as a granny crying, but it turned out to be someone who was hired to kill Sunny. He gets killed by a hair pick and that's the end you see of him. If he was going to die, couldn't he at least get a better death? Couldn't he have some big battle scene? Couldn't he be crying out and thinking of Bernice right before he dies? Instead, it was just unexpected and quite meanlingless to kill him off if you ask me.
• I loved Sunny and Bernice together! They have a lot of cute scenes together so it makes it even more tragic they couldn't even end up together.
• Bernice's acting has greatly improved since her Virtues of Harmony days! In the past, she read all her lines flat and you could tell she had no idea what she was saying. This time, she showed emotion, enunciated properly, and acted well at the same time! I don't think she'll ever be the best actor TVB has, mainly because she only began to learn Chinese when she entered TVB, but she has that "it" factor and a charm about her that is undeniable.
• Sonjia death was also sad. Is it mean that I think the grandma should have died? Her character is just a slightly nicer version of the grandma in Moonlight Resonance.
• The almost battle scene looked so fake. It looked like they cut the clip from an older series that already had the scene and pasted it into this series. The quality of those clips look a lot older than the cleaner crisp visuals of the rest of the series.
  
• I think they had a lot of small side storylines that they added in which felt incomplete since this series was only 20 episodes. Most of the problems get resolved within one episode. It wasn't like it was fast paced- more like that they didn't bother to develop the storyline anymore.
• Wayne is a good villian but it's weird that he's paired with Rosanne Liu.
  
• Matthey Ko's acting has also made some improvements. It's not as wooden and flat as before.
  
• The costumes are pretty.
• I like the theme song by Hins Cheung.
  
• Ugh, they could have made a better and more dramatic ending. Instead it just seems like the writers got lazy and figured that the only way to spice things up was to kill people off.
  

Would I recommend this series? It's hard to say since the beginning had promise but I would say yes if you're a fan of Bernice and don't mind sad endings.